MPV is a great image viewer - let's make it official.

[strelec]

I have been using MPV as an image viewer for the past 6 months, and all I can say is, I am impressed. It is lightweight, loads images quickly, even navigation between images in the same folder is super fast (does it do buffering?). Moreover, it opens any image format, including WebP.

It is better than any image viewer out there currently.

I propose these changes:

1. Add image/* mime associations by default.
2. Add input and config associations (see below).
3. Mouse drag to pan support.

mpv.conf:

[image]
autofit-larger=80%x80%
force-window=yes
hr-seek=yes
image-display-duration=inf
input-conf=~/.config/mpv/image-input.conf
loop-playlist=inf
loop-file=inf
mute=yes
reset-on-next-file=mute,video-pan-x,video-pan-y,video-zoom
script=/usr/share/mpv/lua/autoload.lua

image-input.conf:

1 repeatable playlist-prev
2 repeatable playlist-next
3 set mute no
` cycle video-unscaled
ENTER cycle pause
DOWN seek -2
UP seek 2
LEFT repeatable playlist-prev
RIGHT repeatable playlist-next
MOUSE_BTN3 add video-zoom 0.1
MOUSE_BTN4 add video-zoom -0.1
MOUSE_BTN7 add ao-volume -5
MOUSE_BTN8 add ao-volume 5
SPACE repeatable playlist-next
TAB set video-zoom 0 ; set video-pan-x 0 ; set video-pan-y 0
a repeatable add video-pan-x 0.05
d repeatable add video-pan-x -0.05
s repeatable add video-pan-y -0.05
w repeatable add video-pan-y 0.05
q seek -1
e seek 1

[CounterPillow]

I disagree. mpv isn't a great image viewer, because opening images that are larger than the texture size supported by the GPU makes it fail.

These are some things where mpv fails as image viewer:

• restricted image size
• incremental loading
• prefetching (including decoding the next image in the background)
• showing multiple images at once
• handling very large images (partial decoding and such)

Having a (light) default profile for images would probably not be that off, though.

[prez]

I'm also using it as an image viewer. It works fine, but having some of the features wm4 mentioned (especially prefetching and not having to resort to bad hacks to get a gallery view) would be great.
OP, you might like this collection of scripts: https://github.com/occivink/mpv-image-viewer (and https://github.com/occivink/mpv-gallery-view too).

[strelec]

For me, it loads images so fast, I thought it was doing prefetching. Scrolling through my phone photo collection (12 megapixels) is almost instantaneous, compared to the default Gnome image viewer, which takes around 1 second.

I have also tried to load few very high resolution photos (30 megapixels), and it opens them. How big would the image have to be to exceed the texture size? Maybe relying on CPU decoding for large images is okay.

[Akemi]

I have also tried to load few very high resolution photos (30 megapixels), and it opens them. How big would the image have to be to exceed the texture size? Maybe relying on CPU decoding for large images is okay.

that depends on you GPU, something about max texture size. for vulkaninfo it would be maxImageDimension2D (here 16384) for example i believe. the CPU already decodes it, what is important is presentation.

[prez]

For me, it loads images so fast, I thought it was doing prefetching.

Remote directories.

[hooke007]

Even though I do not recommend to use it as an image viewer.
However, I think you could consider about the third-party program which is based on libmpv ------- qimgv
(It doesn't support the color profile) easymodo/qimgv#89

I think that uses mpv only for video, the rest uses Qt's framework.

PS: I think mpv supports embedded icc profiles now, but not sure if used by default.

[haasn]

Only if you have a display ICC profile set.

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On Thu, 13 Aug 2020 08:41:21 -0700, wm4 ***@***.***> wrote: PS: I think mpv supports embedded icc profiles now, but not sure if used by default. -- You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: #7983 (comment) part: text/html

[wnoun]

mpv uses the file extension (or mimetype, if available) to identify picture files. According to my experience, this does not always give the correct result.

[rubyFeedback]

I actually did not even know (or think about) using mpv as an image viewer. Based on this, I somewhat agree with strelec.

Perhaps a disclaimer can be added to denote the main limitations when it comes to limits for mpv here, but as the example of strelec shows, when mpv is better at viewing images than designated image viewers, it's quite a quality comment to make.

mpv uses the file extension (or mimetype, if available) to identify picture files. According to my experience, this does not always give the correct result.

That's only partially true. It relies on ffmpeg probing, but falls back to guessing by file extension, which actually happens at least for jpg at least in some cases.

Anyway, some of these problems would be solvable for sure with some effort (incremental loading), others (displaying multiple images at once) would be extremely awkward to fit into the CLI player. The latter would ironically be relatively easily to achieve with libmpv.

And just as I wrote this, I found/fixed another image format detection problem. FFmpeg is to blame.